5 Feet of Fury

Christopher Hitchens, reconsidered

Indeed:

This one has been nagging at me for some time.

Two years Christopher Hitchens the famed democratic socialist (or whatever he called himself per decade) died. His death was met with plaudits and sad words by not only his friends (fair enough) but also by many of his ideological enemies, who spoke of his talents as a writer, journalist and polemicist.  His passing was met with sadness on both sides of the Atlantic, in UK, America and Ireland where dozens of fact free liberal journalists and naive conservatives wrote of him as a courageous, society challenging, moralist and essayist.

Of course this may all be true, depending on your POV but I have a few problems with his narrative that I would like to share.

PLUS:

Such excess obscures the most obvious conclusion we can draw from Hitchens’s politics, which is that he was a crank.

Meanwhile, I have similar “problems” with the “Andrew Breitbart narrative,” myself — and the accompanying cult of personality —  which I’ve blogged about before.